A College Republican-led campaign to add President Trump’s statue to the iconic Walkway of the Presidents on the grounds of the Puerto Rico Capitol building in San Juan has sparked outrage at several major media outlets, including Spanish news agency EFE and Univision.
With the patently false opening sentence “The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has no one who loves him in Puerto Rico” EFE chronicles the Build 45! GoFundMe campaign by Puerto Rico’s College Republicans, that aims to build the statue commemorating President Trump’s October 2017 visit to the island with private funds.
EFE’s anti-Trump framing of the story is actually undercut by the information in the body of the report. In less than a week since publicizing the effort, the Build 45! campaign raised more than $8000 towards its $45,000 goal. The news agency’s video on the subject, on the other hand, does not contain the anti-Trump editorializing, and also validates the value of the Walkway as a popular tourist stop for many visitors to the island.
Univision Digital Puerto Rico also weighed in with a totally anti-Trump feature on the Build 45! campaign, with hosts Zamira Mendoza and Luis Joel Aymat both openly editorializing that they would not give “not even a dollar” to the effort.
In marked contrast, CNN en Español Puerto Rico correspondent Rafy Rivera produced an informative and fair report which gave College Republicans President Fernando Jiménez a chance to explain the project and note the surge in support it has received.
RAFY RIVERA, CORRESPONDENT, CNN EN ESPAÑOL: The search for funding for the project recently started through the GoFundMe website. The organizers are surprised.
FERNANDO JIMÉNEZ, PRESIDENT, PUERTO RICO COLLEGE REPUBLICANS: I am surprised that in such little time we have raised so much money. We were expecting about $2,000, $1,500 in two days and we have already received $6,000.
Meanwhile, the famous gossiper and host of the popular show La Comay, who has a large following on the island, also at first insulted Puerto Rico College Republicans Vice President Melvin Soto Vázquez, but at least the next day invited him on the show and gave him a fair hearing to discuss the initiative.
On the Build 45! campaign site, the College Republicans emphasize that “the statues in Puerto Rico’s Walkway of the Presidents do not represent an official endorsement of the policy record of each of the various Presidents, but rather simply commemorate the historical fact of their visits to the United States of America’s largest remaining territory.”
